The present invention relates to an environmental load assessing device and, in particular, to a device for evaluating or assessing environmental loads of a product in each or all of the stages of manufacture, use and disposal thereof.
Environmental load assessing devices have been used for assessing various environmental loads of products in each or all of the stages of manufacture, use and disposal thereof, and further used for developing new products with less environmental loads.
As environmental load assessing devices for assessing environmental loads over the life cycle of products including manufacture, use and disposal, computers installed with the spreadsheet software or the relational database software have been available.
The following environmental load assessing methods have been known:
Specifically, for a product assessment, "House-hold Electric Product Assessment Manual" by Household Electric Product Association and "Environmental Design Assessment Guideline for Data Processing Equipment" by Japan Electronic Industry Development Association disclose methods for pre-assessing environmental loads of the electric/electronic products. In these methods, a check sheet is used for checking whether measures have been taken, based on comparison with a reference product or based on the assessment criteria, relative to assessment items for reducing environmental loads of a product, such as reduction in weight of the product and easiness of assorting process of the product, so as to reduce the environmental loads of the product.
On the other hand, for a life-cycle assessment, Japanese First (unexamined) Patent Publication No. 7-121588, for example, discloses an environmental load assessing method for deriving environmental loads of an industrial product over the life cycle thereof and for designing an industrial product based on the derived environmental loads. Specifically, in this method, an environmental load of an industrial product about one environmental load factor is derived as the sum of an environmental load in a manufacturing process from raw materials to a product, an environmental load in a using process where the product is put on the market and used, and an environmental load in a scrapping process where the product is scrapped and disassembled to produce recycled materials. This method utilizes an environmental input/output table to derive an environmental load of an industrial product over the life cycle thereof.
For assessing a disassemblability of a product which is closely related to the recycleability of the product, the Jan. 1 1994 issue of Nikkei Mechanical, pp. 40-48, for example, discloses a method wherein assessment points on easiness of disassembling of the product are assorted based on manual disassembling basic operations so as to perform the assessment using a bad mark system.
However, the foregoing conventional environmental load assessing devices have a problem that it is difficult to describe, in detail, parts of a product to be assessed and coupling relationships between the parts, and processes in a life cycle of a product to be assessed and coupling relationships between the processes, and store them.
The actual product, particularly an electric or machine product, is composed of a large number of parts, and coupling relationships between these parts are highly complicated. For example, a certain product has a nested parts structure including some units each of which further includes some sub-units.
Similarly, the life cycle of the actual product is composed of a large number of processes, and coupling relationships between these processes are highly complicated. For example, a life cycle of a certain product has a life-cycle flow in the form of a combination of processes of manufacture of the product, manufacture of parts, procuration of materials of each part, distribution and sale of the product, use of the product, scrapping and disassembling of the product and the like.
In the foregoing conventional environmental load assessing devices in the form of the computers installed with the spreadsheet software or the relational database software, the table format is used as a format of a data storage section for storing data about parts of a product and coupling relationships between them, or data about processes in the life cycle of a product and coupling relationships between them. However, it is difficult to describe the foregoing complicated coupling relationships using the table format.
The foregoing conventional environmental load assessing devices have a further problem that it is difficult to change the contents of an environmental load assessing procedure, or add a new environmental load assessing procedure to execute a plurality of environmental load assessments.
As described above, since the table format is used as the format of the data storage section and thus the size and the logical storage location of each item is fixed, the environmental load assessment largely depends on the format of the data storage section. Thus, it is difficult to change the size and the logical storage location of the data storage section or add a new item in the data storage section so as to change the assessment contents.